The Ghost and the Darkness

The Ghost and the Darkness is a 1996 American historical adventure film directed by Stephen Hopkins and starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. The screenplay, written by William Goldman, is a fictionalized account of the Tsavo man-eaters, a pair of male lions that terrorized workers in and around Tsavo, Kenya during the building of the Uganda-Mombasa Railway in East Africa in 1898. The film received mixed reviews and grossed $75 million against a production budget of $55 million. It won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing for supervising sound editor Bruce Stambler. Plot In 1898, Robert Beaumont, the primary financier of a railway project in Tsavo, Kenya, seeks out the expertise of Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish British military engineer, to get the project on schedule. Patterson travels from England to Tsavo, promising his wife, Helena, that he will complete the bridge and be back in London for the birth of their child. Shortly after his arrival, he meets British supervisor Angus Starling, Kenyan foreman Samuel, and Doctor David Hawthorne. Hawthorne informs Patterson of a recent lion attack that has affected the undertaking. That same night, Patterson ends the life of an approaching lion with a single gunshot, earning the respect of the laborers and allowing them to resume their activities safely. Only a few weeks after, however, Mahina, the construction foreman, is dragged from his tent. At sunrise, his mutilated body is recovered, and Patterson tries another night-time hunt, seeking to catch the lion that ate Mahina, but in the morning, he is informed by Starling that the corpse of a second worker has been found at the opposing end of the camp from his position.